Thoughts for the Day: 15 March 2021

 

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Mathematics is usually thought to be a model of absolute clarity of thought achieved with the use of symbols and, hence, no place for Scholastics to be delving. But a prerequisite of most mathematics is analysis of concepts confusedly present in experience, and in this the Scholastics were masters.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The medieval lawyers were the first to consider explicitly the grading of the degrees of proof, with some discussion of how fine it should be; the combination of different pieces of evidence for the same conclusion; and the conflict of different pieces of evidence bearing on the same conclusion. The resulting theory is a coherent one. It is not numerical, and there is no reason to think that it would have been improved if it had been numerical. On the contrary, since modern (English) law has a similar theory, and insists on keeping it nonnumerical,1 there is every reason to believe the medievals were correct in avoiding numbers.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Lamennais and [John Henry] Newman felt sharply, and tried to deflect, modernity’s relentless demand for reasons. Newman wrote that “rationalism,” by which he meant not just denying but overthinking religion, was “the great evil of the day.” If faith was shown to be unreasonable, would not the reasonableness of morality be next?

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

A disillusioned progressive, Adams saw people en masse as well-intentioned but biddable. Political engagement was part, but not the larger part, of their lives. Without a vigilant-enough citizenry, his country’s admirable democratic institutions had been captured by moneyed interests, which paid politicians to govern in the people’s name. To Adams, it was a sordid bargain.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

While I would never discount the great achievements that Western medicine has given overall to human health, if we spent half as much money and time trying to invent a better placebo—or, maybe more accurately, better ways to train our immune system to protect our bodies—we’d likely discover entirely new ways to treat disease. This is, of course, where it’s beneficial to consider the relationship between the environment and human physiology as a wedge to help control and strengthen the immune system itself.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 14 March 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[I]ndigenous communities around the globe use sensory and environmental stimuli to treat their sick. He flashes a list of techniques culled from ethnographic accounts and ancient texts on the screen: sensory deprivation, breathing, fasting, extreme exercise, meditation, hyperthermia, hypothermia, and psychedelic plant medicines. All of these interventions aim to wedge space between the way we experience stress and how our bodies respond to difficult environments. Someone should write a book! I think to myself.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The placebo effect might actually be the Wedge in action.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Patrician classes have taken many forms throughout history.36 However, in all cases, their function is, First, to uphold society by observing its mores and modeling its norms (making all due allowance for the inevitable hypocrisy involved), thus giving the populace something to look up to and be guided by; Second, to direct the affairs of the society for the general good even though this will inevitably further entrench their own wealth, status, and power. What distinguishes a genuine patrician class from a mere oligarchy concerned only with feathering its own nest is a spirit of noblesse oblige— the duty of those in a privileged position to behave with responsibility and generosity toward those who are less privileged, if only out of a due regard for their own enlightened self-interest. Noblesse oblige constitutes the glue that holds a well-functioning civil society together and causes a people to take their cues from above instead of below.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Scott Adams

Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.

The Promise and Pitfalls of Grand Strategy

Hal Brands

The world is far too complex to be reduced to any single organizing framework. There is thus a fine line between clarity and dogmatism, between a useful heuristic and a distorting myopia.

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

Even as its citizens ask for security, in the sense of guaranteed status, they hymn unconfined opportunity. The market myth makes us think that spontaneity will sort out things according to their merits, without the need for planning and regulation. The individual is supposed to forge his or her own “environment,” unfettered by prior social arrangements. More and more the governmental workings of America have come to reflect the necessities of national size and ambition, while the Presidents express a romantic rejection of that machinery, a denial of the rule of necessity, a promise to escape “back” toward remembered freedoms.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

Good stories, poems, and creative nonfiction get a good deal of their power by leaving things implied. When something is implied, the reader is pulled in and participates more deeply in the meaning—experiences the meaning—rather than just understanding it. (See Tannen’s “Relative Focus.”) And many good writers of expository and academic writing do not succumb to the syntactic bias among writing theorists in favor of hypotaxis, embedding, and left-branching syntax. Writers reach readers better when they also know how to call on the rhetorical virtues of parataxis and right-branching syntax that’s so common in everyday speaking.

Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos

In 1949 the average life expectancy  (in China) was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012,  life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 13 March 2021

  

And the post-world is coming!

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Keynes also worried that with the decline of work, all that free time would be a problem because people were not good at leisure. He noted that the indolence of much of the aristocracy, which already faced this problem, was a gloomy omen of what might come to the larger public eventually.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

Heidegger rightly points out: “Descartes himself stresses that the sentence [cogito ergo sum] is not a syllogism. The I-am is not a consequence of the I-think but, on the contrary, the fundamentum, the ground for it.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Beneath Montesquieu’s distinction between the nature of government (that which makes it what it is) and its moving or guiding principle (that which sets it into motion through actions) lies another difference, a problem which has plagued political thought since its beginning, and which Montesquieu indicates, but does not solve, by his distinction between man as a citizen (a member of a public order) and man insofar as he is an individual.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

In discussing Renaissance law and its impact, it should be kept in mind that the law was then much less an esoteric specialization than it is today. Such unlikely people as Alberti and Copernicus were actually doctors of canon law, while almost all of the founders of mathematical probability had some legal connection: Fermat was a professional lawyer, Cardan and Pascal were the sons of lawyers, Huygens was a doctor of civil and canon law....

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 12 March 2021

 

2020 publication

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Language, by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory matters, because it permits a carrying-over, metapherein, of our sense experiences. There are not two worlds because metaphor unites them.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The European visitor simply cannot perceive political realities in the United States, because they are so well hidden by the surface of a society in which publicity and public relations multiply all social factors, as a mirror multiplies light, so that the glaring façade appears to be the overwhelming reality. He cannot imagine that Mr. Jones, who in social matters is obviously the world’s greatest conformist and hardly ever speaks about politics, is nevertheless in political matters a most independent creature with a deep feeling of responsibility as a citizen. It is inconceivable to this visitor that a very complicated system of social interrelationships—determined by even more and more heterogeneous groups than one could find in a class system—can underlie the surface composed of all the worst cultural elements of a mass society.

N.B. This was written in the period immediately after the end of World War II; to wit, before 1954.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

“The characteristic of totalitarianism is not only to absorb man within the group, but also to surrender him to becoming.” Against this seeming reality of the general and universal, the particular reality of the individual person appears, indeed, as a quantité négligeable, submerged in the stream of public life which, since it is organized as a movement, is the universal itself.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 11 March 2021

 

An American classic originally published in 1974

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

Too bad that the recently defeated president didn't get this message; but then he'd have to read.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Maurras’s following in the monarchist “street” cared less for winning arguments than for making trouble. Maurras cared for both. He stirred up right-wing street fighters with violent prose in the newspaper he edited, Action Française, and then disclaimed responsibility for the damage they caused. In 1934, for example, right-wing rioters egged on by Action Française attempted to storm the parliament in Paris.

Seem familiar?

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

Where the new way of knowing required that the observer remain passive, so as not to taint what he was observing with his ‘subjectivity’ – Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, advises us to ‘sit down before fact like a little child’ – Goethe, as we’ve seen, took a more active approach. Like Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘intelligence of the heart’, Goethe wants to get inside phenomena, not behind them to some ‘really real’ world, whether of elementary particles or Kant’s ding-an-sich, the ‘thing-in-itself’ forever barred from our cognition by the ‘categories’ of thought.

Query: How does Goethe's intention to "get inside phenomena" compare with Barfield's idea of "participation?"

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Science is a plant of slow growth. It will not grow (and for a plant the end of growth is the end of life) except where the scientist as the priest of truth is not only supported but revered as a priest-king by a people that shares his faith. When scientists are no longer kings, there will be (to adapt a famous saying of Plato’s) no end to the evils undergone by the society that has dethroned them until it perishes physically for sheer lack of sustenance.

Is this observation relevant to today? (To borrow a 60s cliche.)

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

The shorter our standard time-phase for an historical event, the more our history will consist of destructions, catastrophes, battle, murder, and sudden death. But destruction implies the existence of something to destroy; and as this type of history cannot describe how such a thing came into existence, for the process of its coming into existence was a process too long to be conceived as an event by this type of history, its existence must be presupposed as given, ready-made, miraculously established by some force outside history.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

In other words, the profit motive, whose importance for imperialist policies was frequently overrated even in the past, has now completely disappeared; only very rich and very powerful countries can afford to take the huge losses involved in imperialism.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world.

Why Nations Fail

Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions-extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The archetypal semantics of an experiential universe by Bernardo Kastrup

 

February 2021 publication

Reading this book was both a continuation and a commencement. By way of continuation, it forwards my project to become better acquainted with the thought of Carl Jung, the great Swiss thinker and practitioner of depth psychology. My first formal step was completing Gary Lachman's Jung the Mystic. Lachman's book is a solid biography of Jung that gets its zest from its willingness to consider that aspect of Jung's life and work that Jung didn't want to publicize: that Jung was influenced by--and to some extent subject to--esoteric and paranormal influences. Jung, mindful of the spirit of his time, wanted to be seen as quite "scientific," although in the last couple of decades of his life (after the Second World War), he became more open about his inner life and experiences and this opening revealed more (but not all) of the hidden Jung. I mention all of this because, in a sense, Kastrup continues the story started by Lachman. 

By way of commencement, this title represents the first book-length dive I've taken into Kastrup's work. I've heard him interviewed on Jeffrey Mishlove's podcast two or three times, and I've seen and read some shorter pieces by him. I've read Jeffrey Kripal's praises of his work, and now this work has taken me deeper into Kastrup's thought while also taking me deeper into Jung's thought. (A bit of a spoiler here: but I don't intend that this will be the last Kastrup work I intend to read; in fact, I've already starter reading his Decoding Schopenhauer.) By way of an introduction to Kastrup, he trained originally in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence), earning a Ph.D. He worked in this field, among other places, at CERN. He became interested in philosophy and earned a second Ph.D. in that field with an emphasis in ontology and philosophy of mind. He has become a leading figure in a "renaissance of metaphysical idealism." And the gist of this book is that Kastrup's "metaphysical idealism" has discovered a kindred spirit in Carl Jung. 

Kastrup reports that he first encountered Jung's work as a teenager, but only recently did he re-visit it with the eyes of his fully developed metaphysical idealism and philosophical training. With this new vision, Kastrup very carefully reviews Jung's works--especially his later works--and carefully delineates the terms of Jung's thought. He then proceeds to re-create, as it were, Jung's (mostly unstated) metaphysical grounding. The early portion of the book reviews Jung's overt conceptions and terms (which of course changed over time). Jung formulated his most important terms, like "collective unconscious" (or his later preferred term, "objective consciousness"), "self," "archetypes," "individuation," and "instincts," to name some of his more familiar terms. Kastrup carefully examines each term and its use to gain a firm understanding of the parameters of Jung's mainstream (or "scientific") thought. This portion of the book is quite valuable in its own right simply for the carefully guided tour of Jung's terminology. But for Kastrup, these terms only take him the threshold, so to speak. 

Jung most reveals his underlying metaphysics in his later work, and, it seems, most significantly, as a result of his dialogue (in person and via correspondence with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Their letters (since published and cited by Kastrup), along with Jung's  Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952) provide a great deal of insight into Jung's thinking about the relation of mind, body, and psyche. Also, Kastrup examines Jung's Answer to Job (1952) as providing the deepest revelations available about Jung's spiritual life and insights. Also of note is Jung's (sort of) autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1961, the year in which Jung died at age 84). Based on these sources and many of Jung's earlier writings, Kastrup provides a persuasive re-construction of Jung's metaphysical presuppositions. 

I should note that Kastrup's philosophical perspective ("metaphysical idealism") doesn't impinge on his exposition of Jung's thought, and he only explores intersections with his own perspective after he's laid a solid foundation in Jung's writings. 

I have only two minor complaints about this book: first, there were several run-on words, especially when phrases were italicized. A finger-wag at the publisher! Second, Kastrup's abbreviations for Jung's titles are hard to follow. And other than these two picayune points: an excellent work that provides a solid exposition of Jung's work and  provides an excellent analysis of how it fits into a wider circle of philosophical thought. 

sng

03.10.21

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 9 March 2021

 

2011 publicantion

The Gardens of Democracy

Eric Liu, Nick Hanauer

If we are serious about creating wealth, our focus should not be on taking care of the rich so that their money trickles down; it should be on making sure everyone has a fair chance—in education, health, social capital, access to financial capital—to create new information and ideas.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In describing these movements, the term “hard right” is to be preferred to “new right” because the slogans, themes, and appeals are old. They go back through the twentieth and nineteenth centuries to historic splits on the conservative right, back, in fact, to conservatism’s never-resolved ambivalence about capitalist modernity and hence to its original quarrel with political liberalism.

Theory is a moon buggy for exploring terrain that’s difficult or impossible to explore any other way. We need our wits about us to build and to guide the buggy. The real distinction isn’t between formal and informal methods – they both need each other. It’s between the use of those methods that is skilful and fruitful, rather than just clever, and use that is less so – between good analysis (formal and discursive) and not-so-good analysis.

Nicholas Gruen, "What’s the beef with Krugman? Gruen on the disciplinary incentives of economics"

Political Order and Political Decay

Francis Fukuyama

The study of “development”—that is, change in human societies over time—is therefore not just an endless catalog of personalities, events, conflicts, and policies. It necessarily centers around the process by which political institutions emerge, evolve, and eventually decay.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

What Socrates discovered was that we can have intercourse with ourselves, as well as with others, and that the two kinds of intercourse are somehow interrelated. Aristotle, speaking about friendship, remarked: “The friend is another self”139—meaning: you can carry on the dialogue of thought with him just as well as with yourself. This is still in the Socratic tradition, except that Socrates would have said: The self, too, is a kind of friend.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

All science, said Descartes, rests upon the one indubitable certainty that I think and that therefore I exist. Now the thought and existence of which Descartes spoke were not abstractions—anything thinking anything, or anything somehow getting itself thought about—as those wiseacres believe who offer to emend his formula to cogitatur ergo est, or cogitare ergo esse or the like. Descartes meant what he said, and what he said was that the concrete historical fact, the fact of my actual present awareness, was the root of science.